James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

I did a sketch of the wing of my plane last summer on my way back to Ontario fro British Columbia! It was a very elegant, "scimitar" design, and as I was drawing it in my journal, I noticed the familiar shape of the western end of Manitoulin Island, with Cocburn Island just off it, moving into view beneath us. I quickly sketched their outlines, even forgetting to take a reference photograph in my haste to get them sketched before they slipped out of view! Later I tinted the scene in watercolour, from memory. No geckos, though... I'd like to share the image with you, if there is some way to do that.

It's puzzling how bored and oblivious the majority of airline passengers are to the spectacle of viewing clouds from above and at close range. In the space of three or four generations we went from euphoria to dismissiveness.

Of course, having the occasional pair of hands appear outside the window mid-flight might drag some eyes away from their screens.

I, too, have been doing some paintings of the view out the window. The most recent was approaching Amsterdam; the cloud shadows on shallow water, the clouds themselves, the airplane wing.

You know where "gremlins" came from? During the early days of aviation, especially early war planes, they were pushing the machines harder than they'd ever done before. Strange things would happen that were impossible to reproduce during normal flight or while the aircraft was parked on the ground. Eventually they figured out what was going on at extremes of low air pressure, high gravity maneuvers and the like and one by one the strange phenomena vanished... or at least became more rare. Electrical systems act strange; oil, fuel, air lines, water lines, gaskets, all these things can change at extreme temperatures and pressures. The space era brought in a whole new set of gremlins - but by then there were enough engineers who had experience with the weirdness and could figure out what it was and fix it - but there'll be a whole new slew of problems as the old space engineers are retired/replaced by people who only have degrees and not years of experience.